Hot take: the Oakley Vanguard Meta glasses would be better without AI

I got over the embarrassment of talking to my sunglasses back in 2017 when Oakley released its Radar Pace model.

“Hey Radar.”

That wake phrase would activate a voice assistant built into the glasses. Oakley developed the Radar Pace with Intel, pitching it as a training partner for runners and cyclists. The glasses could connect to your phone and fitness apps and then respond to questions mid-workout. You could ask things like your current pace, distance or elapsed time, and it would answer through small earbuds connected to the arms. It would also offer coaching prompts about your cadence, pace or effort depending on the workout you were doing.

It was one of those products that seemed a bit ahead of its time. Talking to your eyewear still felt very sci-fi, very Minority Report, but the idea behind it made sense. When you’re running or riding, pulling out your phone or even glancing down at a device breaks the rhythm. A voice assistant that lived in your sunglasses was a clever way around that.

Fast forward to today, and the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses are essentially the modern successor to that idea, only this time, it’s powered by Meta’s AI system. They promise to act as a sort of all-in-one ride companion: sunglasses, training assistant, camera, headphones and even an all-knowing search engine wrapped into one sleek piece of sport eyewear.

I received a pair of these glasses in the fall, and five months later, I’m still torn on how I feel about them.

For cyclists, specifically, the glasses offer some enticing features, some of which feel like natural extensions of tools we already use.

For example, there’s Garmin integration. Pair the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses with your Garmin head unit and you get real-time data without having to look down at a screen. That feedback comes either through audio or a small Status LED inside the frame, visible only to you. Set a target (speed, heart rate, effort) and the light shifts when you drift outside that range.

Then, post-ride, there’s a Strava integration that packages everything up for you. Ride data, maps, visuals and captured moments are automatically assembled into a clean, shareable graphic.

This brings me to the glasses’ camera. The frame houses a 12MP ultra-wide (122°) camera capable of 3K video, positioned right between your eyes. Action cameras have been part of cycling culture for years, and in many ways, this is an extension of them, offering a POV and image quality we could only dream of back in 2017. There’s even an autocapture feature, which, tied into Garmin data, can even start recording during AI-identified key moments (efforts or milestones) without you having to think about it.

Whether you’re a content creator or not, the picture and video capture is plain fun. And, for some reason, the easily accessible camera gives me a slight (and false) sense of reassurance riding in traffic: like there’s a record of things if they go sideways.

And then there are the speakers, which might be the best part of the whole package. The open-ear audio built into the arms is surprisingly good: clear, full and loud enough to cut through wind noise without blocking out the world around you. They’re better than any bone-conducting or open-ear clip-on headphones I’ve tried. The volume changes based on the wind noise, so you never miss a word of your favourite podcast, but you can still pick up traffic and general noise of the road.

Beyond the activity-focused features, AI is on standby to answer just about every spontaneous thought that pops into your mind.

Curious about the weather rolling in over the ridge? Ask your glasses.
Wondering how fast you’re going or how far you’ve ridden? Ask your glasses.
Want to know what kind of tree you’re looking at or what that foreign language sign says? Even that, your glasses can do. All the while responding to your text messages and taking calls.

In short: smart eyewear that keeps you connected while your hands stay firmly on the bars. And as a piece of wearable tech, it’s genuinely impressive.

But all that tech is also where this product starts to lose some of its appeal. For one, there’s a growing sense, among cyclists and beyond, that technology is being added to products that may not need it. That, and these days, everything—your bike’s drivetrain, your computer, your power meter and now, your glasses—needs to be charged before you can set out to ride.

Still, batteries are a much smaller concern than the Oakley–Meta partnership. Meta’s AI ecosystem is the brain of the operation. It’s what enables the glasses to answer questions, guide your workout, control audio, take photos and interact with notifications. But it also means Meta is sitting in the middle of all of that information.

And Meta, fundamentally, is a data company. Its business is built on collecting user data and selling it to advertisers. It’s also a company that’s spent the better part of the last decade dealing with the fallout from how that data has been handled.

A lot of the concern extends beyond the wearer, too. Meta has added a small LED indicator to signal when the camera is active, but it’s easy to miss. And for most people, it doesn’t mean much anyway. Despite the safeguards, the idea of wearing a camera tied to a data-driven platform raises questions about what’s being recorded, what’s being stored and where it all ends up.

My wife is one of those people. She won’t let me wear these glasses anywhere near our house or pointed at her. "You don’t know what’s being captured or where that information is going," is the constant refrain.

And that’s where my hot take comes in.

If Oakley built these without the Meta partnership and stripped away the always-on AI assistant entirely, the Vanguard glasses might actually be a better product.

Because underneath all of that, these are still very good glasses. The optics are what you’d expect from Oakley, with Prizm lenses that sharpen contrast and make the road pop a bit more. The build feels solid, the speakers are excellent and the camera is genuinely useful. None of that really needs to be connected to a broader ecosystem.

It’s not hard to imagine a version of these that keeps the best parts and dials the rest back. Local storage for photos and video, synced directly to your phone. Garmin integration that stays device-to-device. No assistant listening in the background, no need to route everything through the cloud.

And perhaps, with less tech, the pricetag would even go down, too.